And measuring doses of penalty is the foundation of the criminal code.  That is so true that this code is in its last analysis but a table of criminal logarithms for figuring out penalties.  Woe to the judge who makes a mistake in sentencing a 19 year old offender who was drunk when he sinned, but had premeditated his deed.  Woe to the judge, if he misses his calculation in adding or subtracting the third, or sixth, or one half, corresponding to the prescribed extenuating or aggravating circumstances!  If he makes a miscalculation, the court of appeals is invoked by the defendant, and the inexorable court of appeals tells the judge:  “Figure this over again.  You have been unjust.”  The only question for the judge is this:  Add your sums and subtract your deductions, and the prisoner is sentenced to one year, seven months, and thirteen days.  Not one day more or less!  But the human spectator asks:  “If the criminal should happen to be reformed before the expiration of his term, should he be retained in prison?” The judge replies:  “I don’t care, he stays in one year, seven months, and thirteen days!”

Then the human spectator says:  “But suppose the criminal should not yet be fit for human society at the expiration of his term?” The judge replies:  “At the expiration of his term he leaves prison, for when he has absolved his last day, he has paid his debt!”

This is the same case as that of the imaginary physician who says:  “You have heart trouble?  Then take a quart of rhubarb decoction and stay twelve days in the hospital.”  Another patient says:  “I have broken my leg.”  And the doctor:  “All right, take a pint of rhubarb decoction and 17 days in the hospital.”  A third has inflammation of the lungs, and the doctor prescribes three quarts of rhubarb decoction and three months in the hospital.  “But if my inflammation is cured before that time?” “No matter,” says the doctor, “you stay in three months.”  “But if I am not cured of my lung trouble after three months?” “No matter,” says the doctor, “you leave after three months.”

To such results have wise men been led by a system of penal justice, which is a denial of all elementary common sense.  They have forgotten the personality of the criminal and occupied themselves exclusively with crime as an abstract juristic phenomenon.  In the same manner, the old style medicine occupied itself with disease as such, as an abstract pathological phenomenon, without taking into account the personality of the patient.  The ancient physicians did not consider whether a patient was well or ill nourished, young or old, strong or weak, nervous or fullblooded.  They cured fever as fever, pleurisy as pleurisy.  Modern medicine, on the other hand, declares that disease must be studied in the living person of the patient.  And the same disease may require different treatment, if the condition of the patient is different.